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… because of the unprecedented violence of the 1950s” (Gikandi 2000, 72).¹³

      The violence that dominates the entire narrative of Weep Not, Child makes it by any measure an exemplar of a narrative of spectacularity that delicately negotiates between personal testimony (autobiography) and fictional recreation. If in the recent past spectacular first‐person narratives have come to dominate and to define the discourse of human rights in literary studies, it is worth reminding ourselves that the African anticolonial Bildungsroman stakes its claim as a human rights novel by resisting and rewriting the ossified formulaic norms, readings, and interpretations of the genre. Within the context of South Africa, Njabulo Ndebele defines spectacularity as the “representation of … the visible symbols of the overwhelmingly oppressive … social formation” which has, over the years, resulted in a brazen, exhibitionist, “highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation … Everything there has been mind‐bogglingly spectacular” (1986, 143). For Ndebele, the spectacular operates within the realm of the obvious because “[w]hat matters is what is seen. Thinking is secondary to seeing. Subtlety is secondary to obviousness. What is finally left and what is deeply etched in our minds is the spectacular contest between the powerless and the powerful” (1986, 143). If we take seriously Simon Gikandi’s injunction that “Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism” (2004, 379), what this means is that we must pay particular attention to the way a work such as Weep Not, Child provides a space in which the relationship between ordinary people and the unprecedented violence of decolonization is represented in its raw form and afforded time, space, and meaning. At many levels, the experiences of the protagonist Njoroge and his entire family fit neatly into what Judith Butler in a different context calls “the injurability … the experiences of vulnerability and loss” (qtd. in Andrews and McGuire 2016, 3).

Weep Not, Child starts off as the story of Njoroge, a naïve child whose hopes and aspirations are anchored in colonial institutions, most notably the colonial school, but ultimately becomes a narrative of an unraveling society in the face of the challenges and opportunities presented by the colonial experience. The novel opens with the news that Njoroge is going to be attending school. His journey into the thicket of the colonial world is characterized by failures, confusions, disappointments, and ultimately an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide when his world collapses around him. Thus, his journey is atypical of a Bildung, defined neither by social expansion and psychological growth nor by the fulfillment of his desires. The opening paragraphs are characterized by a deceptive sense of optimism embodied in Njoroge’s enthusiasm for attending school. His optimism is immediately undermined by the deep sense of loss and material deprivation that defines his existence and thus ironically informs the decision to send him to the colonial school. Njoroge’s journey into the colonial world thus begins not as journey in search of self but one that is structured by the hopes and desires of his parents, and by extension those of the entire community, to overcome their immediate circumstances. His mother desires to compensate for the loss of her son during World War I, to rise above her restrictive social conditions, and to overcome her material conditions. On his part, Ngotho, his father, sees his son’s education as a means to restore his manhood and thereby his social standing through recovery of his lost land. The opening paragraph of the novel is emphatic on their situation of loss and dispossession:

      “We are poor, You know that.”

      “Yes, mother.”…

      So you won’t be getting a mid‐day meal like other children.”

      (WNC 3)

      A few pages later, the narrative shifts from Njoroge’s enthusiasm to the desires of his mother:

      Nyokabi was proud of having a son in school.… She tried to imagine what the Howlands woman must have felt to have a daughter and a son in school. She wanted to be the same. Or like Juliana … Her mother’s instinct that yearned for something broader than that which could be had from her social circumstances and conditions saw this. That is why she has impressed upon her husband Ngotho the need for one son to be learned. If Njoroge could now get all the white man’s learning, would Ngotho even work for the Howlands and especially as the wife was reputed to be a hard woman? Again, would they as a family continue living as Ahoi in another man’s land … A lot of motives had indeed combined into one desire, the desire to have a son who had acquired all the learning there was.

      (WNC 16)

      Throughout the narrative, Njoroge remains unaware of the burden that is being placed on his shoulders. This passage not only speaks to the confusions that have come to define his life as he goes through school but also his lack of awareness of the real purpose of colonial education. His entire experience is thus defined by the disjunctures between his naïve desires and the investments his family and community make on him and the reality of colonial disruption, domination, dispossession, and violence. Njoroge’s sense of optimism is narratively undermined at every stage throughout the novel: His first experience at school is characterized by misunderstanding, harassment, and shame. His encounters with his family’s nemesis, Jacobo and Howlands, and their progeny Mwihaki and Stephen respectively, only further serve to undermine his optimism. Ngugi’s point is clear: The necessary but elusive imperatives for postcolonial revolution cannot be nurtured within the ideologies and institutions of colonialism.

Indeed, school becomes a site for psychical and psychological violence rather than a site for the acquisition of knowledge and discovery of the self. The colonial school offers neither liberatory possibilities nor opportunities for self‐uplift. Instead, the process of education is a means of alienation: School is nothing other than a conveyer of ideologies – colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. Indeed as Njoroge progresses through school, we are told that he “came to place faith in the bible and with his vision of an educated life in the future was blended a belief in the righteousness of God. Equity and justice were there in the world if you did well and remained faithful to your God, the kingdom of heaven would be yours” (WNC 52). The entire education enterprise, buttressed by missionary work, is emblematic of the European colonialist impulse to possess and transform the African mind. Siriana, the high school he attends, is headed by the irredeemably racist school principal:

      If he was quick to praise what was good, he was equally quick to suppress what he thought was evil … But he believed that the best, the really excellent could only come from white men. He brought up his boys to copy and cherish the white man’s civilization as the only hope of mankind and especially of the black races. He was automatically against all black politicians who in any way made people to be disconnected with the white man’s rule and civilizing missions.

      (WNC 126)

      Although education is couched in messianic faith as the spread of Christianity and western civilization, the school headmaster’s benign and slow violence mirrors that of Mr. Howlands and his lackey, Jacobo. Both are united by their belief in white supremacy. The headmaster’s zeal is the classical fusion of religion with civilization in an attempt to socialize Africans to a particular vision of English colonial culture, while designating that which was different as other than truth and in need of tutelage. But the school only effectuates what had already been part of the honorable tradition of western thought with regard to Africa. The humanity of the African had already been questioned by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: “the Africans, having made no history of their own had clearly made no development of their own. Therefore, they were not properly human, and could not be left to themselves, but must be led toward civilization by other peoples: that is, by the peoples of Europe, especially of Western Europe, and most particularly Britain and France” (in Davidson 1991, xvi). In his controversial book Human Rights: A Political and Cultural Critique, a world‐renowned Human Rights Activist/Lawyer Makau Mutua argues that the entire colonial enterprise amounted to a gross transgression of the fundamental human rights of Africans. According to Mutua, “the process of social transformation and identity reconstruction set in motion by the invasion of Africa by both Christianity and Islam, and particularly the former, dislocated and distorted the African worldview almost in its entirety. The colonial state buttressed that process through

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